Section / Sky Over America

Eighty-two years of documented sightings, in one image.

Each dot is a declassified file. The horizontal axis is the year the event occurred, the dot size is the page count of the file, and the color is the agency that released it. The shape that emerges isn't a continuous record — it's a pair of crests. A flurry of Air Force and FBI memos from the post-war years, then a thirty-year valley, then the modern AARO/NASA era arriving like a second front. The valley is not silence. It is classification.

By releasing agency

• DoD

  67

• FBI

  57

• NASA

  15

• State

  6

Note · undated records aren't placed on the swarm. They live in /timeline's "Date unknown" bucket. The archive grows; this page rebuilds when it does.